Investigating Integration Readiness Levels
What does the need for IRLs mean for DoD?
Picking up the theme of DoD procurement readiness levels, this week I’m taking on Integration Readiness Levels (IRLs).
IRLs are a relatively new concept; Gove et al. developed them in 2007. The idea’s ontological roots are as much in the computing industry, which used a similar system to track component relationships, as in TRLs.
The table above that describes each level should be considered in relation to the Defense Acquisition Life Cycle chart shown below; integration activities described by IRLs all take place within this framing of program lifecycles.
IRLs are necessary because the technologies developed in Pre-Phase A, Phase A, and Phase B have become so complicated that it’s not a trivial engineering exercise to plan for them to engage with each other.
Within the history of DoD procurement, IRLs emerged in the middle of developing the F-35 Lightning II, which was a milestone program from a defense procurement perspective. This was really the first aircraft designed during the age of mainstream internet, and it really came through in the aircraft’s…unique…approach to software. The program experienced massive schedule delays and cost overruns, which were attributed to software and supply chain issues. This highlighted two things:
DoD is procuring more complex systems.
Subsystem readiness is essential to meeting DoD production timelines.
So it’s really not a surprise that IRLs appeared at this point in history.
But it is a big problem.
The development of IRLs is symptomatic of not just complicated hardware, but very complicated hardware. The way of measuring readiness for integration might not be necessary if engineers at the design level focused on minimizing complexity. After all, the DoD went about buying military hardware for for a solid 60 years before somebody identified a need to track integration readiness and published it.
Moreover, this vision of procuring complex, more exquisite, systems is aligned with a decrease in the number of units procured. Expanding our scope from the number of F-35s to the United States Air Force’s total fighter and bomber inventory, the picture certainly shows a smaller force.
Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A good deal of the 1989-1999 drawdown, which is the biggest in both fighters and bombers, is certainly attributable to the peace dividend generated by the end of the Cold War. That allowed the Air Force to retire aircraft, and it got rid of the older ones first. Newer technology makes more recently deployed fighters more capable than the ones that were retired.
But even if the airframes today are of higher quality than in 1989, and looking only at the three leftmost columns in the plots below, it’s not particularly clear whether or not there are enough of them to accomplish all the missions they may be called upon to execute.
While that might not have been an issue during the Global War on Terrorism, I consider it an open question whether or not it’s the right way to approach great power competition.
Fundamentally, what kind of wars should the United States Armed Force be able to win?
That’s not a question we can afford to answer incorrectly, and it’s incredibly relevant today. The ongoing campaign in Ukraine has shown since very early on that low quantities of exquisite guided munitions and systems to carry them matter far less in near-peer competition than sheer numbers of less sophisticated weapons.
This is occurring against a broader industrial backdrop of aerospace and defense prime contractor consolidation.
While the plot above ends 20 years ago, the situation hasn’t reversed itself. Defense and dual use technology as early-stage investment sectors are currently very popular, so there’s lots of capital going in. But I’m still worried about the broader environment, because defense unicorns don’t regularly experience major exit events (IPO/SPAC/late stage M&A activity).
If anything, prime contractors investing in startups demonstrates that the trend is continuing, and acquisitions are occurring at even earlier stages of the corporate lifecycle.
The interesting aspect of this to me is that IRLs became necessary after this consolidation, not before, as I might have expected.
I would have thought that by consolidating prime contractors, interfaces would become simpler — even in a world where technology is becoming more complicated — because there’s fewer subcontractors to keep track of and coordinate, and corporate leaders can essentially impose technical decisions on different internal teams. But apparently, that’s not actually the case.
IRLs, then, also call into question whether much of the M&A activity of the past generation in aerospace and defense actually supports national security.
From an engineering perspective, IRLs are a great concept. They simplify discussions about how products relate to each other that engineers don’t like to have unless they’re forced to.
These discussions are important though, because they can improve communication across teams, which mitigates several types of risk.
They also provide context to engineers about what they’re building and why it matters, which I found meaningful when I was working with hardware on defense programs.
My issue with IRLs is simply that DoD feels they’re necessary.
I believe America needs to be designing and building simpler, cheaper defense technology, because that’s the only way the government can buy enough of it to fight and win the wars its political leadership says it needs to be ready for.